Thorough Gibney Doc Looks At Assange, Manning

ALEX GIBNEY'S Wikileaks/Julian Assange/Bradley Manning documentary is a lively digital-age epic with characters as troubled as they are troublesome.

Called "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks," the new film examines the main players with commendable rigor - an achievement in itself, given the polarizing nature of the men involved.

But the movie has an even bigger reach - describing a squirming, encroaching digital Blob that's grown beyond the capacity of any entity or individual to control.

A circumstance, by the way, well-known to cited high-ranking government officials (Bush-era classified-documents czar William Leonard, former CIA director Michael Hayden) - they foresaw the collapse of secrecy decades ago, as soon as the permeable nature of Internet firewalls became obvious.

Among the early infiltrators: Young Aussie Assange, product of a Melbourne hacker culture who very probably (the movie implies) infiltrated a NASA launch while still a teen.

Gibney's quick-sketch bio follows Assange as he continues his hacktivities, is convicted and put on probation, and refuses to neithers cease nor desist. He builds Wikileaks into a phenomenon and issues a public plea for whistleblower info that attracts the attention of PFC. Bradley Manning.

"Wikileaks" has little sympathy for Assange - depicted as all zealous ideals and no compassion. He's described by associates as a vain self-promoter who operates with the bullying posture of selective secrecy he dencounces in others. Gibney also puts on camera one of the women who's accused Assange of sexual assault, and bookends them with Assange's denials. Assange gets the worst of that exchange.

The film has slightly more sympathy for Manning, also bio'd here - unhappy as a gay teen in conservative Oklahoma, positively despairing in the hyper-macho U.S. Army, where he's yanked from early discharge and isolated in a cyber-intelligence unit. There, the deeply troubled, gender-confused, cross-dressing, violent computer genius (he punches a female officer in the face) is given access to an unlimited amount of classified data.

Not the Army's finest hour.

Gibney notes this, and casts the Army's subsequent mistreatment of Manning as badly misdirected self-criticism (though I think the movie is weak on the actual legal case against Manning).

Of course, the Manning-Assange collaboration produced video and data on civilian massacres that recast the public perception of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later, diplomatic cables were released.

With the help, we're reminded, of the bigtime media - newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times - happy to use Wikileaks for access, then jettison Assange as he became a convenient repository for blowback.

It's a grand, fascinating, comprehensive saga, not overstuffed with heroes, and even the arguable villains are seen as riding the info-wave, not guiding it.

The enigmatic star turns out to be unruly information itself, a genie out of its bottle, defying all attempts to romanticize or villify or even manage.

Online: ph.ly/Movies